Coming Home

Brooks sat next to me, shaking his leg as we prepared for our interview. It was the first one we would be doing after releasing The Stage to the world. We had just announced our tour dates and were getting ready to hit the European leg. However, we wanted to get a few interviews out of the way.

“Dude, stop shaking your leg. You’re making me nervous.” I put a hand to the top of Brooks’ thigh. “What’s got you so riled up?”

“I’m ready for tour. It’s been a long time coming.” He smiled over at me. “Are you ready to leave your two lovers behind?”

I laughed. “Charlie can handle is own. It’s Rae I’m worried about.”

“What has that feisty former Marine done now?”

“She joined the military again.” I had to fight not to roll my eyes. Why were both people I loved and cared for fucking idiots? Those two insisted on putting themselves in danger like no other people I had met before. It was freaking insanity.

“And they accepted her even though she’s only got one leg?” Brooks looked at me. Confusion was written plain across his face.

“She’s doing recruitment. She will never see a day of active duty again, but the Marines she went and talked to jumped right on having her in the office. It’s Rae fucking Martinez. If the first female in combat and the first female in Special Forces came to me and said she wanted to be a recruiter, I wouldn’t have said no either.”

“That’s… that’s actually fair,” Brooks said just as our interviewer walked into the room.

“Welcome back boys. You guys ready to kick off your first radio interview?”

We both nodded and waited for the barrage of questions to come in.

Interviewer: I’m here with the lead singer and drummer from Avenged Sevenfold. Why don’t you guys go ahead and introduce yourselves?

Brooks: Hey guys, I’m Brooks Wackerman.

MS: And I’m M. Shadows.

I: So why don’t you guys tell us a little bit about how The Stage came to be.

MS: Well, we’ve always wanted to do a concept album. Nightmare was supposed to set the stage for that, but after Jimmy’s passing, we put it on the back burner. The Stage was just really us sitting down and deciding what we wanted to talk about and to write music about.

BW: Shadows really kicked off the idea. He had been reading all these articles about artificial intelligence and space travel and just sat us down and was like, ‘guys, this is it.’ It developed from there.

I: The Stage is a big undertaking. You just released it without any kind of promotion other than one single. Why did you guys decide on that?

MS: We got tired of the teasing. You know? It’s one of those things where artists would release all of these singles so by the time the album dropped, you felt like you heard them all. It was really Beyonce and Kanye that inspired us by dropping their albums without any hype.

BW: Of course, we knew it would be different for us. We aren’t even close to being Beyonce or Kanye. The fact that it has been accepted so well already is an amazing thing.

I: You’re kicking off your tour in Europe and then what?

BW: Coming to the States! Come on now, Greg!

I: Do you have a favorite song off the album?

BW: For me it’s probably “God Damn.” I just think that’s a great song, and I like the drums on it.

MS: For me, it’s either “Exist” or “Higher.” Both of those just have a lot of meaning to me.

I: Speaking of “Exist,” that is a HUGE song. How did you get Neil Degrasse Tyson in on that?

MS: Originally we were going to have a piece from Carl Sagan, but we couldn’t get his estate to let us have it. So then we moved on to other scientists and reached out. We were really lucky he gave us the go ahead on it.

I: Do you think you’ll ever perform it live?

BW: That’s a fifteen minute song. As nice as it would be to get to have our fans hear that piece live, I think we need to ease them into it. They need a taste of what we have to offer before giving them 15 minutes of the big bang theory.

MS: [laughs] Well that and we already have “The Stage” and “A Little Piece of Heaven” in the mix. I don’t think adding long songs like that is gonna win us any favors.

I: Last question, guys. What makes The Stage so different from your other stuff?

BW: I think it’s just that it’s a unique concept. How many rock artists do you hear talking about space travel anymore? Not a lot.

MS: For me, it’s just the next logical step we could take. We’re constantly evolving. You know Sounding the Seventh Trumpet started out as just screaming. That’s all that album was. Waking the Fallen was half-screaming, half-singing. It catapulted us into the metal scene. City of Evil just became straight singing and hard riffs. The white album was a weird one. Nightmare was for Jimmy. Hail to the King was a tribute. This just felt right.

Notes

And another update.